SNES emulator for Nintendo DS

by archeide

No SNEmul is not dead, it’s simply sleeping. I Hope I will have more time later to fix bugs and add improvements to the emulator, but it’s not really possible for the moment.

Due to a change in the MySql from my provider, Wordexpress was not working correctly since some months. I was hoping that the bug will get fix itself but it seems I needed to upgrade Wordexpres. Anyway it seems ok now…

The new version of SNEmulDS 0.6 comes closer… The new GUI is nearly finished and is being integrated to the main core. I’m waiting for artworks from my friend to complete the GUI design.

A new feature of the next release will be multi-language support. For the moment, the language setting is read from the DS firmware, and the charset used is ANSI Western occidental (Windows-1252) so the translation is limited to : English, French, German, Spanish, and Italiano. But in future, Japanese and other language will be included.

TRANSLATION PROCESS CLOSED!

TRANSLATION PROCESS CLOSED!

All language has been translated already ! Thanks to all who contributed!

Others languagues are welcomed to, but will be not included in next release. Don’t hurry to send new translations because i will not spend much time on translations now.

If you are interested in translating SNEmulDS, this is very simple.

Here are the current files containing the string ressources.
If you want to helop, You just have to translate strings, without changing anything else.

This version aims to improve in sound and graphics. As the emulation becomes more and more complex, it is more and more difficult to add new features without breaking the emulation overall, so some new feature will not be enabled by default for all games. The configuration file select which features are enabled or not, and becomes very important (so don’t forget to put it in the root directory!).

I tried very hard to improve sound, and i succeeded to get much better musics in some games, but there may still some “pops” or “cracks” sometimes, and the sound can slowdown or goes mad in some rare circumtances (the ARM7 seems not powerful enough).

A new menu has been added : the GFX config menu, this menu offer a simple way to change the GFX behaviour in real time. The emulation is not stopped like in the options menu, you can enable/disable several features and see which ones are better for the game. (See README for more informations)
Here is the list of changes

Changed the Sound timers, now the timers should be a bit more accurate and removed the timers hacks

Moved back the Sound RAM in the fast ARM7 RAM, removed unused code from ARM7 codes

Now support sprite address change during frame (limited to two addresses by frame), this makes Ogre Battle much more playable

Left handed people can now enjoy the SNES mouse option (right buttons can be used like left joypad).

Options can now be saved in configuration file

New SNES config menu

Fixed some bugs

Optionnal feature (enabled by configuration file):

Added sound synchronisation fixes, this is a set of flags that make ARM9 slowdown or make ARM9 wait for the ARM7. Those options make Square games (and other games) sound much better, but also break sound in other games. So this option is available through the configuration file. I only changed for the configuraiton file for Chrono Trigger, SOM1 and FFVI. You will have to modify the configuration and test the options for other games.

Added priority per tile for BG3, by detecting if there are more low or high priority per tile at each line (see README)

Added priority per tile for BG1 and BG2, by using the fourth DS layer. Low priority tiles go to fourth layer, and high priority per tiles (this idea was taken from SNESAdvance).

Sprites priorities can now be changed. See configuraiton file for more informations. The default is 1123 but 1223 makes some games look better (like Castlevania IV first level for instance)

It has been a long time i didn’t give any news, so here it is, some news about my progress. I have finally succeeded to improve sound in SNEmulDS. One part has been to work on the sound core (new APU timers, removed speed hacks, put back memory in fast EWRAM) and the other part has been to add a set of emulation hacks that you will be able to play with, thanks to the configuration file.

The way the sound is implemented in SNES emulators for DS bring some synchronisation problems that make sound garbled or make games not boot at all. I found some ways to improve synchronization, but each game need to be tunned differently. For the moment, i have found a way to have good sound with classic Square and Enix games : Chrono Trigger, Secret Of Mana 1, Final Fantasy VI (FFIII in USA/Europe) Terranigma, Illusion Of Gaia. I will let you find the best configuration for other games that have sound problems.